We are often asked why we choose cloud based accounting software such as Xero, Quickbooks and Wave Apps for our customers rather than traditional desktop based software and ERPs. Our decision surprised many of our peers. They’d never heard of cloud based applications and wondered why we didn’t just use the desktop accounting application everyone is using and why carry the risk of putting accounting data on the cloud?

We thought it would be useful to our clients to lay out some of our favorite features and benefits of cloud accounting.

Ease of Use – The interface is pleasing to look at and easy to figure out. For non-accountants, that’s key. Do you want to have to figure out how to use a complicated accounting application or immediately jump in and start processing your transactions. For our team of accountants and bookkeepers, getting up to speed is super quick. Everyone comments immediately how easy and fast it is to use.

Bank account and credit card feeds – Xero, Quickbooks and Waveapps will automatically feed in account activity directly into the accounting system so you don’t have to manually create transactions. That’s an enormous advantage! Only online applications tend to have this feature.

Auto-populating and rules – Not only will the activity feed in, these applications will remember how you coded transactions in the past and auto-populate the fields to save you time. Getting even more advanced, you can setup simple and complex rules to code transactions based on conditions.

Support – Although these applications have a simple interface, something will come up where you need help. They have responsive email and call support teams which is critical for any company. Their help database is also quite extensive and, more importantly, useful.

Integrations and Add-Ons - The Marketplace has a massive amount of software applications that integrate with these apps. This is one of the primary reasons we choose cloud apps as our core accounting platform. No matter what a customer throws at us for their business needs, we can find an application that gets us most, if not all, of the way there to an automated solution. This speeds up our reporting capabilities and reduces the chance of error from our accounting team. Whether you are using Shopify, Big Commerce or countless other third party ecommerce apps, they provide integrations for all the applications out there in the market.

It is Mobile – There are apps for on-the-go accounting which allows you to keep things organized no matter where you are.

Lots of Reports – Data isn’t of much use to your business if you can’t slice and dice it as needed. These apps have a ton of reports which you can customize and export to Excel or PDF.

Real time access - You don't need to wait for the database file to access key financial information or wait for your accountant to close all the transactions before you can make meaningful business decisions. With these cloud applications, you can access the data wherever you are and from any computer, mobile, or tablet.​